BIJNOR: It was a call no one should ever make and none have to answer. On Wednesday night, a four-year-old girl dialled her grandmother on video, holding up the phone so she could see the room behind her. “Papa hung mom. She’s not responding,” the child said. On the screen was her mother’s lifeless body, suspended from a noose.
The grandmother, stunned, wasted no time. She alerted police and the rest of the family, who immediately left Ghaziabad for Moradabad. The child’s father, Rohit Kumar, a software engineer from Modinagar, Ghaziabad, was taken into custody before dawn on Thursday.
The dead woman, Ruby Rani, 35, was a teacher at a primary school in Bikampur Kulwada, Kundarki Block, Moradabad. Originally from Jalalpur, Muradnagar, Ghaziabad, she married Rohit in 2019 and had been living with him and their daughter in a rented house in Buddhi Vihar Colony, Moradabad.
Police are piecing together what happened before that call. SP (city) Ranvijay Singh said cops and a forensic team examined the scene.
“Rohit has been taken into custody for questioning. A case is being registered, and the investigation will proceed based on the post-mortem report,” he said.
The family claims this wasn’t suicide. It was murder, staged to look like one. They allege Rohit was pressuring Ruby for money and the couple had frequent disputes over finances.
On Wednesday evening, he had transferred Rs 50,000 from her bank account to his own via UPI, they said. The couple also had a house in Modinagar, for which Ruby had been paying the instalments alone after Rohit stopped contributing.
“He wanted to sell the house. She refused. He tortured her in various ways,” her parents told police. They also informed officers at Majhola police station about the video call their granddaughter had made.
While the family insists Rohit murdered Ruby and staged the hanging as suicide, police are also investigating the possibility that she took her own life.
According to officers, Ruby had called Rohit before the incident and told him that she would commit suicide. Police have seized Rohit’s mobile phone, laptop, and other electronic evidence as part of their investigation.